Edit File: mimify.txt
:mod:`mimify` --- MIME processing of mail messages ================================================== .. module:: mimify :synopsis: Mimification and unmimification of mail messages. :deprecated: .. deprecated:: 2.3 The :mod:`email` package should be used in preference to the :mod:`mimify` module. This module is present only to maintain backward compatibility. The :mod:`mimify` module defines two functions to convert mail messages to and from MIME format. The mail message can be either a simple message or a so-called multipart message. Each part is treated separately. Mimifying (a part of) a message entails encoding the message as quoted-printable if it contains any characters that cannot be represented using 7-bit ASCII. Unmimifying (a part of) a message entails undoing the quoted-printable encoding. Mimify and unmimify are especially useful when a message has to be edited before being sent. Typical use would be:: unmimify message edit message mimify message send message The modules defines the following user-callable functions and user-settable variables: .. function:: mimify(infile, outfile) Copy the message in *infile* to *outfile*, converting parts to quoted-printable and adding MIME mail headers when necessary. *infile* and *outfile* can be file objects (actually, any object that has a :meth:`readline` method (for *infile*) or a :meth:`write` method (for *outfile*)) or strings naming the files. If *infile* and *outfile* are both strings, they may have the same value. .. function:: unmimify(infile, outfile[, decode_base64]) Copy the message in *infile* to *outfile*, decoding all quoted-printable parts. *infile* and *outfile* can be file objects (actually, any object that has a :meth:`readline` method (for *infile*) or a :meth:`write` method (for *outfile*)) or strings naming the files. If *infile* and *outfile* are both strings, they may have the same value. If the *decode_base64* argument is provided and tests true, any parts that are coded in the base64 encoding are decoded as well. .. function:: mime_decode_header(line) Return a decoded version of the encoded header line in *line*. This only supports the ISO 8859-1 charset (Latin-1). .. function:: mime_encode_header(line) Return a MIME-encoded version of the header line in *line*. .. data:: MAXLEN By default, a part will be encoded as quoted-printable when it contains any non-ASCII characters (characters with the 8th bit set), or if there are any lines longer than :const:`MAXLEN` characters (default value 200). .. data:: CHARSET When not specified in the mail headers, a character set must be filled in. The string used is stored in :const:`CHARSET`, and the default value is ISO-8859-1 (also known as Latin1 (latin-one)). This module can also be used from the command line. Usage is as follows:: mimify.py -e [-l length] [infile [outfile]] mimify.py -d [-b] [infile [outfile]] to encode (mimify) and decode (unmimify) respectively. *infile* defaults to standard input, *outfile* defaults to standard output. The same file can be specified for input and output. If the **-l** option is given when encoding, if there are any lines longer than the specified *length*, the containing part will be encoded. If the **-b** option is given when decoding, any base64 parts will be decoded as well. .. seealso:: Module :mod:`quopri` Encode and decode MIME quoted-printable files.